On the road, and on a date with history

The road trip is a classic American narrative of
escape: Huck Finn lighting out for the territory, Jack Kerouac
chasing his dreams down the blacktop. In Uncertain
Pilgrims, Lenore Carroll gives us a different kind of
journey, narrated by Carla Brancato, a young woman from Kansas City
who is struggling to get over the death of her child. Carla is
following the Santa Fe Trail, determined to exorcise her demons by
immersing herself in a safely distant past.

Carla is
fascinated by the memoirs of 19th-century Army wives, and at each
historic site, she recalls a woman with a connection to that place.
These complex characters include Susan Shelby Magoffin, who in 1846
became the first Anglo woman to travel the trail. Carla tells their
stories to her new traveling companions, fellow history buff Dale
and his son, Tom, who come from Independence, Mo., the aptly named
starting point for the westward journey. By the end of the novel,
when Carla finally tells her own story, she claims her place in
this lineage of strong Western women.

Uncertain
Pilgrims has its flaws. Carla is a first-person narrator,
but there are awkward shifts in the novel's point of view when it
leaves her to focus on Dale and Tom. Carroll should get credit,
though, for taking on a big subject: how Americans relate to the
past, whether it's our national history or our own flawed stories.
When Carla encounters history on display behind velvet ropes, she
struggles to feel the real lives represented there.

One
scene sums up the not-quite-fulfilled promise of this novel. When
Carla first meets Dale at Fort Leavenworth, she's gazing at an
1870s spring wagon, which carried women westward to the lonely Army
posts. "I'd give anything to get inside," she says, longing for an
experience that might transform her mundane Honda-driving
existence. Dale says, "Go ahead," and unhooks the rope. This is
what Carla wants: a chance to step into the past. It's also what
readers need: a heroine who breaks the rules. But Carla hesitates,
climbing into the wagon only after the museum curator gives his
permission. In Uncertain Pilgrims, Carroll's
realistic fictional world never opens up quite enough space for her
heroine's imagination to run wild.